Using AI for Photography

Racoon in Asilomar State Park, California, USA.

This photo was made with AI.

No, I didn’t go online and prompt some wizard to produce an image of a raccoon in a forest, but I took advantage of some amazing technology to process this photo.

I made this photograph 20 years ago with my first pro-level digital camera, a Nikon D100. At that time, Lightroom hadn’t even been invented and Photoshop was in its infancy. The original was underexposed and the color was not good, which is probably why I passed it over previously.

So where does the AI come in? To begin with, my camera was set to Matrix Metering and Aperture Priority. We didn’t call it AI then, but the computer in the camera made the exposure based on a lot of research that came from analyzing hundreds of thousands of photos.

Opening the RAW file in the latest version of Lightroom Classic, I clicked on Auto in the Develop module just to see what Adobe thought were the right adjustments. AI was certainly involved there. I made adjustments to my liking.

The original file is 2000×3000 pixels, a size that most stock photo agents and clients will no longer accept. It was also slightly soft. AI to the rescue: Lightroom>Edit In>Topaz Photo AI. I selected Enhance, and the Topaz app did its magic, doubling the size of the image, automatically detecting the main subject, and sharpening Ms. Racoon. (Disclosure, that is an Affiliate link for Topaz).

There was still more AI involved when I brought the photo into Photoshop and used the Remove brush to get rid of an ugly stick at the bottom of the frame.

So, while I’m a little leery of Artificial Intelligence and how it can be used, and I don’t intend to create images just using AI, I do like the capabilities that I have in making and processing my photographs.

Oh, and by the way, this post had assistance from AI using the Grammarly app.